The Expendable Few: A Spinward Fringe Novel (26 page)

“They should draft you back into service as a part of the exam,” Judge said. “If they can stand you for a day, they pass.”

Davi interrupted the impending spat. “What’s the distraction we’re looking for?”

“Keep watching the Order Support Centre,” Remmy said. “It should be coming soon.”

Davi did as he was told. He watched as people entered the Support Centre with meek expressions, many of them looking beaten and destitute. If he weren’t watching closely he would have missed most of them, there were so many successful people milling around in front. They had the cheery faces, spoke amongst themselves, but after watching for a while, it was plain that most of them weren’t in line at all. They were part of the window dressing, and they shielded a large portion of the main line leading inside. The queue filled with ragged folks who looked like they were carrying all they owned on their back, or in old shopping bags.

They were refugees from other worlds that had been hit so hard by the Holocaust Virus that there was nothing left to sustain them at home. The thick smell of rotting corpses and the sounds of machines trundling down the streets, cleaning up after the carnage were the norm on those worlds, in those towns and cities. Davi knew the sights, sounds, and smells well. He’d seen two cities just like that since his exile. He wondered how many more ruined places he could stand seeing.

“You keep drifting off,” Isabel said to him from behind.

Her slender hand laid on his arm. There was a fry in his hand, half way between the cup and his mouth. He ate that one and put the cup back on the counter. Davi hadn’t even realised she was there. “I’m just remembering a few people we lost along the way.” He said it before he remembered that she lost someone important too. The report was clear; Clark was dead and there was no neural imprint to rebuild from. “Sorry.”

She closed her eyes for a long moment and nodded before speaking. “It’s all right. This trip was dangerous, everyone knew. I only hope it’s worth it in the end.”

“Can it be?” Davi asked.

“It has to be,” she said.

A flash of light so bright that all colour seemed to wash away for a moment burst from the Order Support Centre. The lines scattered, people ran frantically away from something inside. Davi caught sight of something glowing for a moment, then, for just an instant, he saw what it was. Emiss, their guide through Trest, stood with arms outstretched. Her face was distorted, it seemed almost enlarged by an expression that was so filled with hate that it outshined the light fighting to burst through her skin. He could see bright red and yellow fluids rushing through her body, burning her clothing away.

Soldiers barely had time to draw their rifles and sidearms before the chemical reaction reached its critical point. Davi wasn’t the first to dive over the counter when she exploded, rending hundreds of humans to shreds inside and outside of the Order Support Centre.

Remmy led the charge behind that counter. Crouched down low, he had his ripper out. When the forced silence that followed large explosions was over, he fired at the nearest staff member of the Flipper Boy, half severing his neck in a two second burst. Isabel scrambled past the dying cook and flipped a small access panel open. Remmy continued his rampage, Kipley, and Judge joining in. Mary rolled to the other end of the circular counter and took a watch position.

Davi knew what his job was, and turned his attention to the events outside, over the edge of the counter. The blast and carnage ended less than twenty metres from where he took cover, and soldiers hadn’t recovered their senses yet, let alone the hundreds of surviving civilians who were knocked down, stunned still, or just starting to panic.

The floor was scorched in a radiating semicircle pointing away from the Order Support Centre. The dead and dying littered half of the shopping gallery, and having to stand back without offering assistance caused a pang of regret that Davi found difficult to ignore. The transparent ceiling just above the Support Centre had blown out completely. The darkened entrance to the Centre itself was a blackened hole. Emiss had taken revenge for whatever wrongs the Order had brought on her, and then some.

People were starting to move, to moan, and in some cases, scream. Chaos was coming.

Davi and Mary both knew their roles. They were charged with watching the crowd, the guards especially. If someone noticed them hiding behind the counters of the Flipper Boy and was about to get aggressive, they would be the first to raise the alarm for everyone else. The recovering crowd wasn’t getting immediate support from security or medical personnel. A panic was imminent. There was no crowd control, no members of security were taking the initiative and directing people. Not being able to jump out and start directing the innocent to safety made something inside Davi hurt.

They trained Freeground soldiers as guardians first. He had just witnessed a massacre for the sake of the issyrian race on a world Freegrounders had no business fighting for. The first emergency team emerged from the north exit. There were six of them, flanked by a pair of utility bots. Dozens of stunned people called out to them as they passed, and they were ignored, blocked by the hard, tall steel of the support bots. They may have been on antigravity skids, but they were still the better part of a ton each.

Neither seemed to be armed, and they were causing a fair amount of chaos as they made their best speed towards the Order Support Centre at the opposite end of the shopping gallery. As if spurred by something Davi didn’t have time to notice, the crowd began their wailing and screaming as the stunned silence of the immediate aftermath became the bedlam of terror. The able bodied trampled the injured, each other, and crushed towards the exits nearest them. The hard floor rumbled under the pounding of thousands of frantic feet.

The emergency team stunned people who got between them and the Order Support Centre. The few guards and soldiers who were present were swallowed by the maelstrom of panicked people. Their own fault, they should have taken control. If Davi were in their place, he knew he wouldn’t have let things get so bad.

When the first of them came towards them, he was waiting for it. A woman rushed towards his section of the counter, and he raised his ripper, shaking his head. “Not here!” he shouted just loudly enough to be heard in the racket.

The woman elbowed the young man at her side hard, then he saw the gun and ran in another direction. A few behind them noticed him brandishing a pistol before he lowered it, and their hesitation directed the people behind to instinctively bound away, towards the next booth. That wouldn’t last long.

He looked over his shoulder in time to see Remmy push Isabel away from the access panel, shaking his head.

“Sorry!” she was saying. “I told you you should try to decode this thing, you’re the expert.”

“But you’re shit with a weapon,” Remmy replied. “I thought you could pop the inner hatch while I helped sweep the employees out of the way.”

“You mean I didn’t want to kill these workers,” she replied. “These were innocent people.”

“There’s no such thing here! Everyone around us is a card carrying member of the Order of Eden, they are the enemy as much as any soldier.”

“Just get us in,” Isabel replied, drawing her pistol. It seemed too big for her, but she brandished it with surprising familiarity. There were lies in the neural report from Clark’s head, somehow they’d managed to paint her as an innocent who would turn from combat. What Davi saw then told him otherwise; she was as ready to kill as he was, and she joined him at the counter.

Davi decided to put that aside like so many other things as he focused his attention on what was happening beyond cover. The panicked crowd was getting closer, he readied his weapon. There was no stun setting - anyone who came too close would be shot through with several high velocity blades. Pain and blood would cause more panic.

Several men, all dressed in what looked like the colours of some kind of sports team, pressed by, bending metal stools that were driven into the floor as solidly as any support beam. Davi cringed as he heard bone crack and one of them scream. The crowd was pressing too closely. “Stay back!” he called out as loudly as he could. He couldn’t see past the wall of people who tried to shy away from the sturdy booth, and only the first row could see him and Isabel with their weapons in hand. She looked at him nervously.

Davi could see no alternative but to set the velocity of his weapon as high as he could, hoping that the projectiles would break the sound barrier and frighten the crowd away. He fired up, and never thought he would be so relieved to be half-deafened by the sounds of weapons’ fire.

“Good thinking!” Tamera said as she fell in beside him. She set her firearm to match his.

“Yeah, let’s be all loud and obvious for the soldiers who’ll probably be here any minute,” Kipley added.

“He’s saving lives, asshole!” Isabel said before letting loose with her own burst of fire in the air.

The panic of the crowd, and the randomness of their flight were reinforced as a beaten up armoured shuttle came out of the clear blue sky, thundering towards the opening in the gallery ceiling. The doors along the sides slid open as it slowed, firing emergency deceleration thrusters until it was within a few metres of the shredded metal roof.

Doctor Marcelles, in the dark amber armour Davi had seen in the last moments of Clark’s neural report, was the first person he saw leaning out the side of the ship. A dozen other issyrian soldiers leaned out with him. The pilot barely gave the fleeing public enough time to get out of the way before touching down, shaking the ground hard enough to rattle Davi’s teeth.

The crowd was even more frenzied before as more gunfire - not theirs - pierced the air. Their reinforcements had arrived, and so had some of the Order’s. The civilians were caught in between.

Davi looked around quickly and didn’t see soldiers, so he jumped up on the counter. “Take the tram exit!” he shouted. He pointed to the exit behind the crowd in front of him, and after yelling the same thing several times while watching for soldiers the crowd started turning. He knew he was living what could be his last moments very foolishly, but he would rather die knowing he tried to save people from the impending crossfire than sitting idly by.

It was working. The people nearest to the subway exit were rushing down the steps, and the access ramp. To his horror he saw the strobing light of weapons’ fire coming from the tram entrance to which he was directing people. More soldiers were on their way, and they weren’t afraid to cut their way through the people they should be protecting.

Davi was yanked off the counter by Judge. “You’re going to get killed!”

He started to reply, but the words got caught in his throat. Instead he managed to say, “More soldiers are coming from below.” At a glance he could see that Remmy had cracked the access panel in the middle of the counter island floor and was opening the hatch that led to the environmental regulation systems. They were moments away from breaking through into the planetary environment systems.

The frenzied crowd split under the pressure of gunfire from two sides. Some ran over the counter and right between everyone hiding behind it, rushing to the other side, over the opposite counter and beyond. Many went around, bumping the fixtures hard, but after less than a minute, Davi could see the open firefight between the issyrians led by Doctor Marcelles, who brandished a heavy double barrelled rifle in either hand, and the Order of Eden soldiers who struggled to make entry from exits all around them.

Davi was relieved to have an enemy to aim for. Kipley was gleeful; there was a glint in his eye that didn’t belong to a sane man. It was his favourite type of situation - a shooting gallery from good cover.

Using shields made from old ship plating, several issyrians rushed from the shuttle and started to cross the twenty five metre distance between them and the counter. Two issyrians were trying to cross carrying gas canisters the size of a man’s head. Even with the makeshift cover carried by their fellows, they couldn’t quite make the distance thanks to the enemy’s suppressive fire. There weren’t many soldiers firing, but they all seemed to know that keeping the issyrians pinned down in and around the shuttle would be better than letting them progress.

Enemy soldiers were breaking through the thinning civilian mob that retreated from the tram steps. It was chaos there more than anywhere else, with people trying to get to the subway and as many trying to retreat from the soldiers forcing their way up. Davi saw a few soldiers break through and caught his first target full in the face. He watched with relish as blood, bone, and flesh sprayed out the back of his helmet. Their armour wasn’t made to resist the hardened blades of a ripper.

Judge and Kipley focused their fire on the same exit, and they did not go wanting for targets. The soldiers broke through the civilians blocking the way and surged up in teams too large to count. Their relentless push paid off. For every soldier Davi and his team managed to kill or immobilize before they reached the top, another made it to the gallery proper, where they retreated to the nearest cover so they could dig in for a firmer counter-offensive.

The counter strike was coming from the far end of the gallery behind them as well. By the time the issyrian team was halfway to them, their cover was taking fire. Sparks and bits of white hot metal were flung into the air as a heavier shot struck the deck in front of the stand. “A few of those hit us and we won’t have much cover left!” Davi shouted.

“Where do you want me, boss?” Kipley shouted between bursts.

Davi looked in every direction, trying to get a good read on the situation. There were a few soldiers taking cover wherever he looked. Their hold was getting shakier by the moment. “Are you ready for the canister, Remmy?” he asked.

“I’ll be ready in twenty seconds! We’re just breaking into the pipeline now.”

“All right, I need two volunteers to make the distance between us and those issyrians!” Davi said.